Docker and the Path to a Better Staging Environment

Staging environments are notoriously difficult to set up and maintain. Unless you have a top-notch DevOps team, staging environments are usually different from production environments, and consequently, they are fraught with problems—failing deployments, "out of disk space" errors, and various other issues. Even when the staging environment is great, there's still a problem: There’s only one. If you want to test a feature branch, you must allocate time or, alternatively, install the feature branch and risk disrupting other testers. It’s time the testers took control about building their own testing environments, and we can do it using Docker, Docker-Compose, and Docker Swarm. Join Gil Tayar as he explains what Docker is and how to quickly deploy an app that includes a front end, backend service, and database, and he'll show how to run an end-to-end test on it. You'll return to your office with the ability to help developers change their code so that it can be deployed using a Docker setup, and you'll know how to execute the necessary changes to make the application deployable in such a setup.

From the olden days of DOS to the contemporary world of software testing, Gil Tayar was, is, and always will be a software developer. He cofounded WebCollage, survived the bubble collapse of 2000, and worked on various big cloudy projects at Wix. His current passion is figuring out how to test software, which he has turned into his main job as evangelist and senior architect at Applitools. He has religiously tested all his software, from the early days as a junior software developer to the current days at Applitools, where he develops and tests for software that tests software, which is almost one meta layer too many for him.